Lansinoh Silicone vs Medela Easy Pour: Which Breast Milk Storage Bag Actually Saves You Money?

COMPARISON · FEEDING TIME

Almost nobody thinks about milk storage bags before the baby arrives. They go on the list somewhere below the pump and the steriliser, and then at about week three you open the freezer drawer, look at the wall of flat little pouches you are getting through, and start doing sums.

That is the moment this comparison is for. The two bags here answer the same question in opposite ways. The Lansinoh Silicone Milk Storage Bags are reusable pouches made from platinum food-grade silicone: you buy five, wash them, and keep using them. The Medela Easy Pour bags are single-use, pre-sterilised and sold fifty at a time for the price of a coffee and a pastry. One is a small upfront cost that keeps paying you back. The other is pennies per bag but never stops being an expense.

The obvious conclusion is that reusable wins on cost, and for a lot of products that would be true. Milk storage is the awkward exception, because of one detail that almost never makes it into the product description: a bag that is sitting in your freezer holding milk is a bag you cannot wash and reuse. A frozen stash locks your reusables up for weeks or months at a time, which changes the maths completely depending on how you actually store milk.

We looked at both against how expressing genuinely works day to day, rather than in a straight price-per-bag race: what happens when you pour one-handed at 3am, how they behave once frozen solid, how much freezer space they eat, and what the washing up is really like. All parent comments below are shared anonymously.

Lil' Bubba's verdicts

• Best for Reusable Fridge Rotation: Lansinoh Silicone Milk Storage Bags · 8.2/10 - pays for itself in under a month if milk moves through the fridge rather than the freezer
• Best Overall for Building a Freezer Stash: Medela Easy Pour Breast Milk Storage Bags · 8.5/10 - cheap enough to freeze and forget, with the best one-handed pouring of the two

Quick comparison

	Lansinoh Silicone	Medela Easy Pour
Rating
Type	Reusable silicone	Single use, pre-sterilised
Pack	5 bags	50 bags (25, 100 and 200 also sold)
Capacity	240ml per bag	210ml per bag
Cost per bag	About £3.19, reused	About 12p, once
Seal	Double seal plus outer zip slider	Double zipper, double layer
Pouring	Wide opening	Separate fill tab and pour spout
Freezing	Flat or upright	Flat stacking, self standing
Cleaning	Dishwasher safe, no UV steriliser	None, disposed of after use
Labelling	Write-on panel, chalk marker included	Printed date panel

How we picked the two

We wanted a genuine like-for-like on the decision parents actually agonise over, which is reusable against disposable, not one disposable bag against another. Both products here are in stock through our retail partners in the UK, both come from established breastfeeding brands rather than unbranded sellers, and both are widely used enough that the feedback we see is about long-term living with them rather than first impressions.

We read the manufacturer specifications for the canonical numbers, checked live retailer listings for current pricing and pack sizes, and then set that against the themes that come up repeatedly when parents talk to us about storing expressed milk. Where a criticism appears often enough to be a pattern rather than one bad batch, it is in the cons below.

What to look for in a breast milk storage bag

How you store, not how much you store. This is the deciding factor and it gets missed constantly. If you express and use within a day or two, milk lives in the fridge and bags cycle back to you quickly, which is where reusables shine. If you are building a frozen stash for going back to work, each bag disappears into the freezer for weeks. Reusables cannot cycle, so you would need to keep buying more, which removes the entire cost advantage.

Pouring while holding something else. Expressing rarely happens with two free hands and good lighting. A bag that will not stay open, or that needs pinching while you tip a bottle into it, is the sort of small daily irritation that turns into spilled milk. Look for a genuinely wide opening or a dedicated fill tab.

Seal quality over seal marketing. Nearly every bag claims to be leakproof. What matters is what happens after freezing, because milk expands and a stressed seam is where thawed milk escapes. Double seals and double layers are worth paying for. So is not overfilling, whichever bag you buy.

Freezer footprint. Flat freezing is not a gimmick. Bags frozen flat stack like files, thaw much faster than a solid block, and turn a chaotic drawer into something you can actually rotate oldest-first. Self-standing bags that also lie flat give you both.

Labelling that survives. You will not remember which bag is from which day. A write-on panel that stays legible through freezing and handling is genuinely important for using milk in the right order.

Cleaning reality. Reusable means washing, and milk fat clings. Check whether a bag is dishwasher safe and whether the opening is wide enough to get a brush inside, because a pouch you cannot clean confidently is a pouch you will stop using.

1. Lansinoh Silicone Milk Storage Bags / 10 · Best for Reusable Fridge Rotation

These are proper silicone pouches rather than plastic bags: thick, flexible, food-grade platinum silicone that stands upright when you are filling it and lies flat when it goes in the freezer. You get five per pack at around £16, each holding 240ml, with a double seal backed up by an outer zip slider and a write-on panel with a chalk marker in the box.

The case for them is straightforward. At roughly £3.19 a bag against about 12p for a single-use equivalent, each silicone pouch needs about twenty-seven uses to break even. If milk is going into the fridge and coming back out within a day or two, you can clear that in a month and everything after is free. The case against them is equally straightforward, and it is the freezer: five bags is five bags, and any that are frozen are out of circulation until the milk is used.

What parents love

• The waste stops. This is overwhelmingly the reason people switch, and the relief is real once the bin is not filling with pouches. One parent told us: "most importantly the fact that they are reusable, you can easily wash them and they are ready to use again."
• They hold up to the freezer. Silicone tolerates freezing and thawing far better than thin film, and repeat users report no seam failures over months. A parent shared: "stored in my freezer safely, never tore and were just spot on."
• Filling is genuinely one-handed. The wide opening stays put rather than collapsing, so you can decant from a pump bottle without pinching the bag open at the same time.
• Labelling you can actually redo. Because the panel is chalk rather than print, you relabel with each use instead of running out of space, which suits a bag meant to last.

What to know before you buy

• Washing is the real cost. Milk fat clings to silicone and the pouches need warm soapy water or a dishwasher cycle after every single use. We hear repeatedly from parents that this is the thing that decides whether reusables stick: "I wish they were easier to wash out and sterilise at home so they can be reused."
• No UV sterilisers. Lansinoh specifically advises against UV sterilising because it shortens the lifespan of the silicone, which is worth knowing if a UV unit is how you sterilise everything else.
• Five bags does not make a stash. If you are freezing milk to go back to work, five pouches will not get you far, and buying enough packs to build a frozen store costs more than the disposable equivalent while leaving them all locked in the freezer.

Best for

• Parents expressing for fridge use within a day or two
• Anyone trying to cut single-use plastic from the daily routine
• Occasional expressers who need a handful of bags in rotation, not a stockpile
• Households that will genuinely run a dishwasher cycle every day

2. Medela Easy Pour Breast Milk Storage Bags / 10 · Best Overall for Building a Freezer Stash

The Easy Pour bags are the modern version of the format most parents picture: pre-sterilised, ready straight out of the box, 210ml each, sold in packs of 25, 50, 100 or 200. What separates them from a basic pouch is the two-tab design. One tab opens wide for pouring milk in, and a second, narrower spout is for pouring it back out, which means thawed milk goes into a bottle without you cutting a corner off or wrestling the whole top open.

Construction is a double layer with an oxygen barrier and a double zipper, and they are built to freeze flat while still standing up on an anti-slip base for filling. At roughly 12p a bag they are cheap enough that you never think twice about using one, which is precisely the point when you are stashing milk you will not touch for two months.

What parents love

• Pouring out without the mess. The dedicated spout is the feature people single out, because decanting thawed milk is where older bags always spilled. A parent shared that they had no issues with leaks at all across a long stretch of use.
• Flat freezing that actually helps. Frozen flat, they stack like paperwork and thaw noticeably faster than a block, which matters when a hungry baby is waiting and you are defrosting from solid.
• Nothing to wash, ever. Pre-sterilised and disposable means no extra washing up at the end of a day that already has bottles and pump parts in it.
• Buy depth cheaply. Because packs scale to 200, building a genuine return-to-work stash is affordable in a way reusables cannot match.

What to know before you buy

• The cost never ends. At three bags a day, six months of expressing runs to several hundred bags. It is small money each time and meaningful money in total, and unlike silicone you have nothing to show for it afterwards.
• Filling can still need two hands. The double zipper that makes the seal reliable also makes the top springier, and one parent noted they still ended up using two hands while pouring milk in because the opening would not stay put on its own.
• Recyclable is not the same as low waste. They are made from a single recyclable material, which is better than most, but it still assumes your local kerbside collection takes it, and many do not.

Best for

• Parents building a frozen stash before returning to work
• Exclusive pumpers producing more than the fridge can turn over
• Anyone who wants zero additional washing up at the end of the day
• Households short on freezer space that need reliable flat stacking

What about the other names you have seen?

Two brands come up a lot in this category that we cannot currently offer through our retail partners. Tommee Tippee's Pump and Go pouches are built around a closed system where you express straight into the pouch and then feed from it, which is genuinely clever if you are already using their pump, but it ties you to that ecosystem. Philips Avent also sells its own storage bags that work with an adapter onto their pump range, again best value if you already own the matching kit. If you are committed to either brand's pump, look at their own bags first, because the direct-connect saves a decanting step neither product here can match. If you are not, the two bags above are the ones to compare.

How to choose

Choose the Lansinoh Silicone Milk Storage Bags if your expressed milk mostly lives in the fridge and gets used within a day or two. That fast turnaround is what lets five pouches cycle repeatedly, clear the twenty-seven-use break-even inside a month, and then cost you nothing but a dishwasher slot. They are also the right answer if reducing single-use plastic matters to you enough to accept daily washing up as the trade. Be honest with yourself about that last part, because the parents who abandon reusables almost always cite the cleaning rather than the performance.

Choose the Medela Easy Pour Breast Milk Storage Bags if you are freezing milk in any serious quantity. Building a stash for going back to work means bags leave circulation for weeks, and that single fact makes disposables the cheaper and more practical option no matter how appealing reusable sounds on paper. The pour spout and flat freezing are the best in this pairing, and at 12p a bag you can afford the depth you actually need.

Plenty of parents end up with both, and that is not a cop-out. A pack of silicone pouches for the fridge rotation alongside a box of disposables for anything going in the freezer covers both patterns properly, and costs less than committing to either one for a job it is not suited to.

Add it to your Nest

Storage bags are exactly the sort of unglamorous, genuinely useful item that gets forgotten on a wish list and then bought in a panic. If you are putting together a free BubsNest registry, add whichever of these suits how you plan to store milk, and add them early. They are inexpensive enough that friends and family often pick them up alongside a bigger gift, and having them in the house before the first proper expressing session is worth more than almost any other feeding purchase you can make.